I'm trying to programmatically add an identity column to a table Employees. Not sure what I'm doing wrong with my syntax.
ALTER TABLE Employees
ADD COLUMN EmployeeID int NOT NULL IDENTITY (1, 1)
ALTER TABLE Employees ADD CONSTRAINT
PK_Employees PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(
EmployeeID
) WITH( STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF,
ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY]
What am I doing wrong? I tried to export the script, but SQL Mgmt Studio does a whole Temp Table rename thing.
UPDATE: I think it is choking on the first statement with "Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'COLUMN'."
This question is related to
sql
sql-server
tsql
ddl
The correct syntax for adding column into table is:
ALTER TABLE table_name
ADD column_name column-definition;
In your case it will be:
ALTER TABLE Employees
ADD EmployeeID int NOT NULL IDENTITY (1, 1)
To add multiple columns use brackets:
ALTER TABLE table_name
ADD (column_1 column-definition,
column_2 column-definition,
...
column_n column_definition);
COLUMN
keyword in SQL SERVER is used only for altering:
ALTER TABLE table_name
ALTER COLUMN column_name column_type;
It could be doing the temp table renaming if you are trying to add a column to the beginning of the table (as this is easier than altering the order). Also, if there is data in the Employees table, it has to do insert select * so it can calculate the EmployeeID.
This is how Adding new column to Table
ALTER TABLE [tableName]
ADD ColumnName Datatype
E.g
ALTER TABLE [Emp]
ADD Sr_No Int
And If you want to make it auto incremented
ALTER TABLE [Emp]
ADD Sr_No Int IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL
Source: Stackoverflow.com